Outline of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Chapter One

• How does the universe go?
• Modern ecological thinking

  Two Arrows of Time

• New system sciences
• Basic regularities and a grand synthesis
• The Great Chain of Being

• The sciences fall apart
• time's arrow downward

• A rather novel idea
• From less ordered to more ordered

• Repairing the damage
• Material reductionism: reduce to the material
• The other side: elevate all to the mental
• Reductionism and Elevationism
• Split thought to be mind vs body
• Both sabotaged by the more primitive and radical split: body vs matter

• Fractured
• physiosphere: fact
• noosphere: value and morals

  The Modern Evolutionary Synthesis

• Closing the gap: order out of chaos
• The Science of Complexity fills in the gaps

  The Problem of Hierarchy

• Sciences shot through with the notion of hierarchy

• Opponents of "hierarchy"
• Heterarchist oppose themselves
• Wholistic sciences, though, reveal hierarchy everywhere

• Natural (or normal) Hierarchies
• Pathological (or dominator) Hierarchies

  Holons

• What is whole at one stage becomes a part of a larger whole at the next stage
• Whole in one context, is simultaneously a part in another
• Normal hierarchy, then, is simply an order of increasing holons

• Accusation of "Linear" Hierarchies
• Not just linear, but interdependent and complexly interactive

• Hierarchy is asymmetrical: process does not happen in the reverse
• Seed to tree, atoms to molecules, not other way

• Hierarchical networks necessarily unfold in a sequential or stagelike fashion

• Upward causation and downward causation
• Within a given level of any hierarchical pattern there is heterarchy
• Inclusion of previous levels capacities, functions, etc.
• New depth, something extra added, value added
• More valuable

• Hierarchy is actually holarchy

• Heterarchy, alone, is merely differentiation without integration, lacking holism

  Pathology

• Abusing their power of upward or downward causation
• Pathological (or dominator) hierarchies
• Pathological hierarchy: Ontologiacl Fascism (one over many)
• Pathological heterarchy: Ontological Totalitarian (many over one)

• Holarchy means: the balance of normal hierarchy and normal heterarchy

  Qualitative Distinctions

• Extreme Heterarchist
• Their values embrace of heterarchy is itself a hierarchical judgement
• Hating judgements and hiding their own
• Self-ethic of inarticulacy and their other-ethic fo vocal condemnation

• Taylor says "qualitative distinctions"
• Frameworks and contexts unavoidable
• "Framworkless agent is a monster"
• Cultural relativists

Chapter 2

The Nature of the Pattern

• Twenty Basic Tenets
• Drawn from the modern evolutionary system sciences; not confined to those sciences
• Fully compatiable with it-, we-, and I- languages

  Twenty Tenets

  1. Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons

• undercuts the traditional argument between atomism and wholism
• undercuts the argument between the materialist and idealist camps

• holons all the way down
• also turtles all the way up
• mathematics in an irreversible, ever-expanding, no-upper-limit universe
• the universe is not itself a Whole
• merely a part of the very next moment's whole
• any whole is a part, indefinitely

• "Wholeness"--this is a very dangerous concept
• engineer social utopias, these Wholists
• they do not include
• "Ultimate Wholeness": this is the essence of dominator holarchies, pathological holarchies
• the "Whole"
• the "All"

• reintroduce term Kosmos
• the Kosmos is composed of holons, all the way up, all the way down

• one last example
• the "postmodern poststructuralists"
• sliding play of texts within texts
• Derrida does not deny truth: truth and meaning are context-bound

  2. Holons display four fundamental capacities: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendence, and self-dissolution

• a. self-preservation
• they are not defined by their context but rather by their own individual form, pattern, or structure
• holons are defined, not by the stuff of which they are made, nor by the context in which they live, but by the relatively autonomous and coherent pattern they display

• b. self-adaptation
• fit into its existing environment

• agency and communion
• agency expresses its wholeness
• communion expresses its partness
• this primordial polarity runs through all domains

• c. self-transcendence
• evolution is the result of self-transcendence at all levels
• this vertical dimension cuts at right angles to the horizontal agency and communion
• new forms of agency and communion emerge
• introduction of new and creative twists in the evolutionary stream. There is not only a continuity in evolution, there are important discontinuities
• grade: a set of characteristics or abilities that clearly give descendent species certain advantages over their ancestors

• d. self-dissolution
• holons "dissolve" along the same vertical sequence in which they were built up

• these four "forces" are in constant tension
• the more intensely a holon preserves its own individuality, the less it serves its communions or its partness in larger or wider wholes
• this is a constant tension across all domains

• forms of pathology: too much agency or too much communion

• the constant vertical battle is between self-transcendence and self-dissolution
• an example

  3. Holons emerge

• emergent holons are in some sense novel; they posses properties and qualities that cannot be strictly and totally deduced from their components
• high-level law cannot be stated in the vocabulary of the low-level description

• emergence means indeterminacy
• unprecedented emergence means undetermined by the past

  4. Holons emerge holarchically

• as a series of increasing whole/parts
• but not vice versa

  5. Each emergent holon transcends but includes its predecessor(s)

• and then adds its own new and defining pattern or form or wholeness
• it preserves the previous holons themselves but negates their seperateness or isolatedness or aloneness
• all of the lower is in the higher, but not all of the higher is in the lower
• all development is envelopment
• all the basic structures and functions are preseved and taken up in a larger identity, but all the exclusivity structures and functions that existed because of isolation, set-apartness, partialness, exclusiveness, sparative agency--these are simply dropped and replaced with a deeper agency that reaches a wider communion

• the new and senior pattern of wholeness can to some degree limit the indeterminacy of its junior holons
• indeterminacy is restricted by the higher-level field
• units in isolation behave more indeterminately than they do when they are part of a higher-level unit

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